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still hungry after all these years

The CAFO subsidy

“Americans have begun to ask why the farm bill is subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils at a time when rates of diabetes and obesity among children are soaring, or why the farm bill is underwriting factory farming (with subsidized grain) when feedlot wastes are polluting the countryside and, all too often, the meat supply.

“For the first time, the public health community has raised its voice in support of overturning farm policies that subsidize precisely the wrong kind of calories (added fat and added sugar), helping to make Twinkies cheaper than carrots and Coca-Cola competitive with water.”

That was Michael Pollan back in November writing in the NYT about Big Food’s welfare check, which will be paid on or about ….March 15, the latest deadline Congress has set for figuring out how to fund Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (factory farms) while pretending to help ordinary farm families.

And you care because? It’s your money. Doh!

I bring this up because a political friend of mine, Tom Diffenbach, asked this question: “How much more will you pay to have your (name the produce) be organic?”

How much, Tom, are you willing to pay in hidden costs like the Farm Bill and Chesapeake Bay cleanup money to support industrial commodity crops grown with artificial fertilizer that pollutes our water, just so feedlot owners can have cheap grain for the meat cows standing knee-deep in acres of their own shit for most of their miserable lives?